Government shutdown: Why many Republicans have no reason to deal

The prevailing wisdom ahead of the government shutdown was that tea party lawmakers who agitated for it would fold within a few days, once they got an earful from angry constituents and felt the sting of bad headlines. House GOP leaders called it a “touch the stove” moment for the band of Republican rebels, when ideology would finally meet reality.

But there’s another reality that explains why that thinking may well be wrong, and the country could be in for a protracted standoff: Most of the Republicans digging in have no reason to fear voters will ever punish them for it.

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It will get worse - VandeHei reports

Remarks after Obama meeting

The vast majority of GOP lawmakers are safely ensconced in districts that, based on the voter rolls, would never think of electing a Democrat. Their bigger worry is that someone even more conservative than they are — bankrolled by a cadre of uncompromising conservative groups — might challenge them in a primary.

So from the standpoint of pure political survival, there’s every incentive to keep the government closed in what looks like a futile protest over Obamacare. The latest theory gaining currency in Congress is that it will take a potential default on the nation’s debt in a few weeks to bring the crisis to a head.

Just look at the ringleaders of the defund-Obamacare effort in the House: Georgia Rep. Tom Graves, a Tea Party Caucus member, represents a district where Obama won just a quarter of the vote. Fewer than two in five voters in Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie’s district backed the president for reelection. And Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador, a poster child of the conservative Club for Growth, is in a district where Obama got just 32 percent.

“Why is it us [that has] to give up the fight? How about we actually negotiate?” asked GOP Rep. Markwayne Mullin, who represents an east Oklahoma district where Obama received 32 percent.

The congressional map is far more gerrymandered today than it was 17 years ago during the last shutdown, when House Speaker Newt Gingrich was negotiating with President Bill Clinton. According to David Wasserman, who analyzes House races for the Cook Political Report, 79 of the 236 House Republicans serving during the last shutdown resided in districts that Clinton won in 1992. Today, just 17 of the 232 House Republicans are in districts that Obama won in 2012.

“Is redistricting a big deal in the sense that there is a greater threat from a primary than a general election? The answer to that is yes,” said David Winston, a Republican pollster and adviser to Boehner. “It’s clearly an element.”

The post-2010 redistricting process combined with recent demographic shifts helped solidify the Republican majority; few GOP seats are seen as seriously endangered in the midterm elections. But those factors have also put House Speaker John Boehner in a straitjacket, forced to answer to a Republican conference that has little appetite for resolving the standoff on anything resembling Democratic terms.

In an interview with POLITICO on Tuesday, Iowa Rep. Steve King, a tea party hero, predicted that the shutdown “won’t be a day or two. It will be a little longer than that, at least.”

Boehner has seen this movie play out in nearly every major legislative battle over the past year. During the “fiscal cliff” fight late last year, the speaker was forced to pull a bill from the floor after conservatives rallied against it. A similar dynamic sank a farm bill in June.

Republican strategists hope that by the time voters head to the polls 13 months from now they will have forgotten about the shutdown. It’s possible, they say, that anger about Obamacare will crowd out bad memories of the current mess.

But GOP operatives are also aware that the longer the shutdown lasts, the more likely it is to sway races next year. And they know that there’s little they can do to persuade conservative members to move on from the fight. As much as they want members like Graves, Massieand Labrador to get on board with their view that the shutdown could hurt the party in moderate districts, they realize it’s just not going to happen.